I’ve been playing 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Metroid Prime Remastered recently, and I’ve been shocked by how little of this game I remember despite owning it on GameCube back in the day. The opening scene, in which Samus briefly has access to her full suite of powers before losing them, was familiar. And I distinctly remember wandering around the landing zone and surrounding area on the Tallon Overworld. But that’s 🎃about it.
Did I ever make it to the Magmoor Caverns or did I never even make it past the first real area? I de🎃finitely didn’t make it to Phenandra Drifts. How is that possible?
Well🤡, you have to understand, I was not very smart as a kid. Or, rather, I was good at a narrow set of things — reading 𒉰and writing, the things that led me to this career — and never really worked to get good at stuff that didn’t come naturally. Using a map was definitely on the list of things that didn’t come naturally.
That means any map. I have never remembered a street name in my life. I had trouble understanding the map in 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, too, and mostly just ignored it and the compass in favor of wandering around until I found something new. That was basically how I played Zelda games until I started writing about video games prof𓃲essionally a🔥nd needed to become more efficient.
But Metroid Prime’s map is not just any map. Tallon is represented as a series of 3D corridors and arenas. It’s the kind of holographic layout you can imagine a sci-fi protagonist swiping their hand through the air to navigate. It confused the hell out of me as a kid, and I'm sure it played a big role in my giving up before even reaching the Morph Ball.
But, returning to Metroid Prime now that I'm a full-grown adult, I'm finding the map very easy to use. The 3D rotation can still feel a little weird in your hands — not unlike using Ultrahand in Zelda — but I don't have any trouble making sense of it. So, what changed? Well, for one, I was a 10-year-old then and I'm 29 now. Giving your brain a little time to finish cooking works wonders.
But, I can point to a more specific factor, too. Early on into my games writing career, a ton of Metroidvanias (Chasm, Dead Cells, Guacamelee! 2, The Messenger) came out in the space of about a month, and I somehow ended up reviewing all of them. I had played 2D explore-em-ups before, but this was a baptism by fire and ended up breaking my laissez-faire approach to exploration. Review deadlines meant I didn't have time to just amble around until I found the way forward.
For the first time, I was paying attention to the map. I was zooming in and finding all the doorways I had left unopened, then systemati𒁃cally checking them to see if I had found the tools I needed to progress. This is🧜 probably something that a lot of players figure out early on, but I had mental hangups about making myself work to understand the map.
Now, returning to Metroid Prime, I have a mental routine I can run through if I realize I don’t know where to go. Like Samus Aran, I'm returning to those old locked doors and finding that I now have the skills to blast them open.